A bond that was shaken but definitely not stirred

When a leading manufacturer of seating for mass transit applications needed a durable joint that was super strong as well as aesthetically pleasing, it turned to Newcastle-based Advanced Adhesives for a solution.

Few mass-transit applications have as much riding on them as rail, bus, or aircraft seats. In each of these methods of transport, public safety remains dependent to a significant degree on the structural integrity of the individual seats should something terrible occur.

But it isn’t just safety that matters – light weight remains vital too because it translates into less energy needed to move the mass, with corresponding savings for operators. Further, manufacturers are aware of the need to design products that have strong visual appeal to both operators and their passengers.

In the case of the rail seating at the centre of this particular application, it quickly became apparent to the technical team at Advanced Adhesives that its Type 8062 adhesive would deliver on a demanding technical specification for bonding the complete structural carcass of the intended seat: it is an adhesive which the company had history of in transport seating, having had the same adhesive specified for use on an aircraft seat.

In order to secure approval for the project, the seating manufacturer would be required to submit its completed units to exhaustive testing at an approved industry body, where substantial forces in all axes would be applied to determine whether the seat met the minimum published standards for public safety. It did, and with pleasing margins in all of the many criteria tested.

However, before the completed seats could be submitted for these official tests prior to entry into service, the manufacturer needed to see for itself if Advanced Adhesives’ confidence in its bonding solution would be proven in the company’s own testing. To this end a special rig was designed and built at the Advanced Adhesives testing facility in Newcastle which would demonstrate how much strength there was in the bond.

The test was designed to replicate many years of daily use and abuse of the handles on top of the seats by passengers, and the results were interesting. As the test rig approached 800,000 cycles, the structural material to which the adhesive had been applied failed, with the bond itself remain completely intact. As a result of this, Advanced Adhesives secured the contract for bonding the seat carcass on the new design.

Reflecting on another success for Advanced Adhesives, technical director and business owner Graham Crozier observed: “Our ability to test designs in-house has helped many customers prove concepts at the earliest possible stages in their designs, permitting speedier product development with the potential for huge savings by getting things right before committing to a design or process.”